This master’s thesis suggests that Oi! - lyrically – gives voice to a youth community whose identity lies in everyday working class life. The identity in question is based upon class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and community awareness. As these are intertwined, the thesis shows a more complex genre than that of Matthew Worley’s “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British punk”. On the other hand, using the above categories - derived from the studies of Kathryn Woodward – allows this essay to detect a genre identity made from a distinct “the Same” and “the Other” – us and them, as described by Stuart Hall. The latter consists of members of the middle and upper classes along with all kinds of intellectuals. “The Same” is based upon a common belonging to the working class and its local communities, but also on nationhood. On the contrary, the male gender in general and the male sexuality in particular adds to the idea of Oi!´s “the Same”. In contrast to the idea of “the Same”, Stephen Greenblatt’s idea of dissonance works to explain cracks in the façade of Oi! as explained in the spatiotemporal discourse. Moreover, Oi!’s “the Same” is quite alike the subaltern of Antonio Gramsci. This concept suggests that the members of the proletariat are too unaware to be ideologically enlightened and therefore their culture expresses the way of working class life as it is, complete with eventual moral flaws. Whereas Gramsci uses the subaltern as a description of the rural proletariat of southern Italy and suggests folklore as the cultural outcome of that particular discourse, this essay aims to use it similarly but with Britain of the 1980’s and Oi! at its focal point. Furthermore, this essay describes the “Circuit of Culture” - as explained by Woodward - and puts Oi! into that model, which enables an understanding of the genre as an expression of produced, consumed, regulated, and represented identity. In conclusion, this master’s thesis do not refute Worley´s description of Oi! as a socioeconomic product, but rather adds to that by intertwining Woodward´s categories. The intersectional understanding of Oi! states that class, gender, community, sex, and nationality work together to create a genre, which represents a Gramscian subalternative proletariat. However, Hall’s “the Other” makes it perfectly clear that there is a distinct gap between Oi! and white power-music, which is also proved - throughout the essay - by the two genres regard to whiteness studies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-49199 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Bradling, Björn |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för film och litteratur (IFL) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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